Snapchat's New "Maps" Feature Is Helping People Catch Cheating Spouses

Snapchat's New "Maps" Feature Is Helping People Catch Cheating Spouses!

By and large, people who cheat on their spouses or significant others are probably a lot more common than you even realize. According to a number of recent studies, as many as 21 percent of men have been unfaithful to their partner at some point in the past. While it's true that only 15 percent of women acknowledged an affair in either a current or previous relationship, that still represents a massive increase of roughly 40 percent over the last 20 years alone.

But perhaps the most interesting statistic of all is the fact that 74% of men say that they'd definitely cheat on their partner if they knew with certainty that they could get away with it. Luckily, that "getting away with it" part is getting harder and harder all the time — particularly thanks to the mobile, tech-driven world that we're now living in.

Case in point: One woman recently suspected that her boyfriend was cheating on her in their relationship and she turned to the most unlikely of technological sources to do something about it. If you're a Snapchat user and saw the launch of the company's "Maps" feature as something to essentially be ignored, you might want to think again ... particularly if you're concerned about infidelity.

The Snapchat Maps Feature: What Happened

In the event that you're unfamiliar, the Snapchat Maps feature that is built into the popular social networking platform essentially shows your exact location on a map every time you use it. You take a snap of that delicious sandwich you had for lunch and post it on your story, at which point Snapchat then shows your current location on the Maps feature for all to see.

If you're in a particularly interesting location and you want to see what other people are up to and seeing, it's a great way to do precisely that. It's also, as it turns out, the perfect way to catch your cheating partner in the act.

You see, something that a lot of people don't realize is that the Snapchat Maps feature goes live the moment you use it for the first time. Even if you only viewed the Maps screen for about 10 seconds just to see what all the fuss is about, that feature is now permanently enabled. You can put yourself in "ghost" mode to essentially turn it off, but this is something you have to do manually.

All of this is exactly what one cheating boyfriend did NOT know about when he posted a snap featuring his Bitmoji one afternoon. His girlfriend went to the Maps feature and watched that Bitmoji as it traveled around their city and soon rendezvoused with another woman!

Not only could she see with absolute certainty that her boyfriend and her (no doubt former) best friend were in the same location, but she could also see exactly where that location was — the boyfriend's house. This was during a period where there was absolutely no reason for those two people to be together beyond the obvious one.

The woman immediately took to Twitter to vent her frustrations, but the "damage" was done. Her boyfriend had been revealed as a cheater and, thanks to his soon-to-be-ex girlfriend, the world now knew about it.

In the end, this should serve as an important lesson to us all — when you're open to the idea of living a life that is completely connected to modern technology at all times, you'd better work hard to understand how that technology actually operates. Nobody is making an argument for cheating — in fact, it's a good thing that she caught her boyfriend in the act before it was too late. But at the same time, this is just another in a long list of examples of the level of privacy that we've given up in recent years. Rest assured that this is not the first story of this type in the modern era and it almost certainly will not be the last.